"Untitled" (Portrait of the Magoons)

With his poetic use of everyday materials and reduced aesthetic vocabulary, Felix Gonzalez-Torres emerged as an essential creative voice in the late 1980s. His participation in social and political activism, both individually and as a member of the art collective Group Material, fed his interest in the imbrication of public and private life. In 1987, he began a series of "dateline" works consisting of a string of text listing places, objects, dates, people, and events in random order. He extended this practice between 1989 and 1994, producing a series of sixteen language "portraits" by assembling bits of language and significant dates with each work’s initial owner. He asked his subject to provide a list of formative moments and then subjected this information to editing, sometimes deleting, adding, redating, rewording, or rearranging a sequence. The artist then merged personal milestones, significant only to the owner of the work, with important historical events, rupturing both the narrative continuity and temporal linearity of the portrait.

A 1994 letter from Gonzalez-Torres illuminates his concept: "We are not what we think we are, but rather a compilation of texts. A compilation of histories, past, present, and future, always, always shifting, adding, subtracting, gaining. These portraits are an attempt at dealing with the theoretical and limited aspects of portraiture. We are as much a product of the invention of TV as we are the product of our parents, and domestic environments, historical events and accidents, and the social forces that have shaped that so-called ‘public’ life."[1]

Produced in 1993 for the collectors Bob and Nancy Magoon, "Untitled" (Portrait of the Magoons) consists of a single line of serifed text painted like a frieze along the walls of a room in metallic silver. Critical to the artist’s concept for the work, the portrait can exist in more than one place at a time and each new iteration can take a different form, with deletions, additions, and reorganizations to the original text at the discretion of the work’s owner. This cedes the authority of the artist to whomever holds the work, giving them the express power to manifest it anew. Any viewer of the work will also inform its meaning as the letters and numbers coalesce into different affiliations and associations. The portrait, meant to be a true likeness of an individual, thus becomes subjective and unstable.


[1] Felix Gonzalez-Torres, letter to Robert Vifian, December 3, 1994. Reproduced in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ed. Julie Ault, Göttingen, 2006, pp. 170–71.